A Very Small Thing
by Tiamat's Child
Summary: A very little can be very great. Mei grows up.


**Title: **A Very Small Thing  
**Author:** Tiamat's Child  
**Fandom:** Fullmetal Alchemist Manga  
**Word Count:** 952  
**Rating:** K  
**Characters/Pairing** Mei, Xiao Mei  
**Summary:** A very little can be very great.  
**Warnings:** None.  
**Notes:** Written for fma_fic_contest at Livejournal, prompt 52, "Suffering/Loss". I think I'd like to revisit this general concept. This just isn't long enough for everything that needs to go in it.

**A Very Small Thing**

Some days Shanbao couldn't make it out of her bed until the sun was already past its highest point. Some days even then she made it no further than the porch beneath the eaves, where she sat with her hair disheveled, as her tea grew cold beside her.

"I'm sorry, darling," she'd say, when her daughter, the Imperial Princess Mei, came to her after her lessons, Xiao Mei, her panda guardian, on her shoulder, a tray of red bean paste rolls shaped like plums in her hands. "I left you to do up your own hair again."

"It's fine, Mama," Mei said. "Please share these rolls with me."

Mei did not know why her mother hurt so much. When she was younger, she'd been afraid that it was her fault, that she was the one who had made her mother too soul sick to move. She could never think what she had done, but perhaps if she gave her mother reason to smile, she could heal the damage, if only a little. Even a little would mean so much.

Mei brought her mother little gifts. Leaves and twigs and snail shells. Her mother smiled, and touched them, but it never seemed to shift the haze away. Sometimes it seemed to Mei like there was gauze between her mother and the rest of the world and she could see through it only dimly.

Sometimes, Mei dreamed of the gauze tightening, twisting, binding shut her mother's mouth, cutting across and crushing her esophagus, killing her.

Sometimes Mei was afraid.

It was not just Mei and her mother in their house. No, it was a large house and it held a large household. There was the cousin who taught Mei to doctor, to heal and change, redirecting energy of both body and earth. There was the elderly aunt who taught Mei to fight, who Mei could never quite touch, although she sometimes came close, and who could leave Mei gasping on the ground after a stamina building exercise. There was the cook, who made Mei the bean paste rolls and whispered to her that they were her lady mother's favorite food. The cook knew that Mei loved mushrooms, and Xiao Mei liked water chestnuts steamed or sauteed with tender bamboo and ginger sauce, which was good, because Mei liked those too.

And that was not all! Mei's uncle taught her to garden. Another cousin taught her how to listen, how to hear the air, and know when there was an animal moving, a long way off. More cousins and more aunts and more uncles and all of them with their place in her life, even if, with her very smallest cousin, that was only to tug at her braids and get her sticky hands all tangled up in Mei's skirt.

And outside the house there were the merchants and the scholars and the young woman Mei's cousin knew, who had come at her request to teach Mei things she had never mastered. There were farmers and fishers and cutters of wood, and all of them looked at Mei and smiled.

For a very long time Mei did not treasure their smiles as she should have. She was too busy chasing after her mother's smile, which she could always have, but which, observation informed her, was far harder won than any other mother's smile. It twisted Mei's heart for a long, long time.

Until, before she ever met Xiao Mei, there was a flood, and Mei, though not very tall, went out with her cousin who taught her to try to hold it back. It was a dark night and stormy, and there was water everywhere. No people died, but one man's ox drowned.

"Mei," her auntie said in the morning, when Mei at last came out of bed, yawning and red eyed and walking into things. "Mei, you must go and console that poor farmer on the loss of his animal. I will go with you."

Mei did not treasure other people's smiles as much as she should have, but she was still a good child and a dutiful student, so she nodded as she tried to hide a yawn behind her hand, and put on her good clothes and went.

It was strange, how much the farmer's smile looked like her mother's, when what had hurt him had not been Mei's fault at all, had had nothing to do with Mei. Mei, still sleepy, had begun to look and it struck her - how many people had something like her mother's look of pain.

For a while it panicked her. She was too used to thinking of pain as her fault. Too accustomed to accepting responsibility for even that which she should not, which she could not, because it was older and heavier than she could carry. But as time passed and Mei saw more of these things she had come to recognize, she learned: there was pain in the world, and most of it was not caused by her, but even that which was not caused by her she could sometimes ease a little, share a little, although it was not like doctoring, and not like ruling, and it was hard.

But, she learned, she could do it, because she knew what it was to hurt, and she knew she could not bring her mother off the porch if her mother could not go herself. It was no good to try. The only thing to be done was to bring her red bean paste rolls, and sit with her, and let Xiao Mei steal half the plate. And sometimes, she thought, sometimes it helped a little.

And a little was a very great thing.


End file.
